BigNote

They're probably just "dumb" in comparison to corvids and parrots and the like.

Well obviously it's very difficult for the poor to leave and if you aren't poor it's actually a pretty nice place to live.

Also most of the loyalists in the colonies fled to Canada during and immediately after the American Revolution, for obvious reasons.

This. I entirely understand that some people don't have that option, but it's worth reiterating that if you have a choice, you're best off not to have partitions at all.

I run Mint on an 8-year-old Mac desktop machine with no partitions and it's lightning-fast for everything I need it to do.

It's also worth mentioning that I have said desktop machine because my wife is a pro photographer and Apple and Adobe have colluded for decades to create a kind of "planned obsolescence" whereby professional photographers are ostensibly locked out of the current industry standard unless they run a very recent version of Photoshop that by design isn't compatible with hardware architecture that's more than about 5-years-old.

None. My wife doesn't know about tact, or the polite white lie or anything like that. She doesn't have time for that bullshit. It's one of her endearing qualities.

What a crock of shit!

Why would capital willingly poison its workforce as a deliberate policy? That makes zero sense.

I can see capital writing it off as a necessary side-cost of doing business, but I can't see it as a deliberate policy.

Again, it makes no sense. Capital wants a relatively healthy workforce, not one that's falling apart due to lead-caused neurological decrepitude.

I have a cousin who still insists that her mom died of pneumonia and that it wasn't COVID. Her husband is currently in prison for storming the capitol on January 6th, which tells you all you need to know. It's weird because she's the only one in my extended family who's even remotely into far right craziness.

Allegedly there are two known instances of people in the US dying due to complications from the vaccine, though one of them wasn't the mRNA vaccine that the anti-vaxxers were most scared of. Compare that to the over 1 million people who died from COVID.

That and the fact that everything about our society shits on working people and tells them that it's their own fault that they aren't rich like the college-educated elites who look down on them.

It doesn't actually make any sense, but I am telling you that this is a huge part of the resentment that Trump was able to tap.

I can and do agree with everything you argue while also maintaining the objectively obvious fact that context matters in politics.

Fair play

but that would require major reworking of large areas.

Yes, that's precisely what will be required. There's no getting through this without implementing massive changes to our way of life. Everyone wants there to be some kind of easy get-out-of-jail-free card, but that's not how it's going to be.